IAN LADYMAN: Kylian Mbappe ending as a loser after hitting a World Cup final hat-trick is so unjust

At the end, as the Lusail Stadium began to resemble a Buenos Aires street carnival, Kylian Mbappe sat in the French dug out and waited for it to be over. That’s one of the problems with cup finals. When you don’t win you have to wait forever until they let you go home.

So arguably the best player of this titanic World Cup final sat with lips pursed and chin resting on the tips of two hands pressed together as if in prayer.

When his 24th birthday rolls around on Tuesday, he will still have just the one World Cup winner’s medal and after the contribution he made to this astonishing game it will take some time to get used to that.

Some things will do nothing to soothe Mbappe. Not the commiserations of French president Emmanuel Macron, who somehow appeared on the field at full-time.

Not even the presentation of the Golden Boot, given to him for ending this month in Qatar as the tournament’s leading goal scorer. Football is a team sport. As such, it’s the team results that really count.

But one day, and it probably won’t be soon, Mbappe will sit down and watch for the first time the events of this night 20 miles north of Doha. And when he does he will see that he has his name written right the way through perhaps the greatest World Cup final of all time.

This was not a night that saw Mbappe become a repeat champion. That shot at immortality was taken away from him. He will ask, like we all will, why it was that France did not play until the final fifteen minutes of normal time.

But as Lionel Messi prepares to leave the stage clear with a move to the American MLS, Mbappe proved himself here as worthy of at least taking further steps towards some kind of comparable greatness.

The France forward scored three goals here, four if you include a penalty in the shoot-out. One of them – the first French equaliser - was superb. The kind of pure, clean strike that makes you sit bolt upright in your chair. You could almost hear the crack of the whip from high up in the stand.

But it was not that moment that stuck in the memory as this great modern ampitheatre emptied sometime around 10pm local time.

No, it was a piece of play in the 122nd minute when – seconds after Lautaro Martinez had headed wide for Argentina at the other end – Mbappe took possession on the far side of the penalty area and started to weave his way infield looking for a shot on his right foot.

The odds were against him. Bodies were in the way. But there are certain footballers that make you believe anything may be possible and Mbappe is in that category. For a split second this incredible game felt as though it may be granted the most incredible finale.

The destiny of this final was in his hands and the whole stadium felt it, too. Four fifths of the Lusail feared it. The tiny pocket of French supporters wished for it. You could just tell.

It wasn’t to be. After two Argentina players were beaten, a third was brave enough to put a foot were others may not have dared. That was it. The ball, and the chance, were gone.

But for that brief moment in time we were all in Mbappes’s thrall and that he ended his night as a loser was somehow unjust. To contribute so much and come away with nothing is the side of sport from which there is occasionally no escape.

Quite why France played so meekly here for so long may remain a mystery. For almost eighty minutes, they rose not remotely to this occasion. It had shades of Brazil’s failure to show up for their big night against, coincidentally, the French back in the 1998 final.

However here, unlike that night in Paris, there was to be an awakening. And when it came Mbappe, playing through the middle from the moment coach Didier Deschamps made desperate changes with his team two down after half an hour, was present in its heart and soul.

There is so much more to the PSG player than speed. Mbappe has a game intelligence, an understanding of time and space that will allow him to carry a threat deep in to that time of his career when quickness from a standing start is not quite so easy to find.

He also has a deep well of sporting courage. Harry Kane revealed recently how difficult it is to score two penalties in a game. Here, Mbappe scored three.

This was a game that France had to rescue three times in order to have an opportunity to repeat their 2018 triumph. They did that bit. It was the final part that proved beyond them.

This is a French team that will come again, though. They will be a threat at the 2024 European Championships. As this breathless game fizzed toward its conclusion, it was young French legs that carried them on. Marcus Thuram. Randal Kolo Muani. Eduardo Camavinga. Aurelien Tchouemani. We will hear these names again.

The French carried dignity in defeat. Argentina’s talented but frankly unlikeable goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez behaved pretty dismally during the shoot out and the Polish referee – excellent up until that point - should have dealt with him sooner.

It would have changed nothing, though. Argentina played the better football for longer. They deserve their third World Cup win. Messi delivered when his country needed him too and so did his club mate from Paris.

It’s just that there was only room for one of them at the podium at the end. Messi will walk out of the door of our lives soon and it may be that those that follow will ultimately stay stranded in the foothills of his genius. Mbappe, at the very least, is now deserving of a place on the same mountain.